Chofesh Part 1

For the first week of my chofesh, vacation, I went to Tel Aviv, Akko, and Haifa. I was only in Tel Aviv briefly. With my friend Asher, who I did all my traveling with, I went to Nachalat Benyamin, which is an artists' market in Tel Aviv. The market is filled with very beautiful things, many of which are made by the same people who are selling them. We walked through the market for several hours before heading off to Haifa with the key to our friend's apartment.

After spending the night in the apartment we took off for Akko, or Acre. Old Akko is a walled in city on the Western coast of Israel north of Tel Aviv. Like the Old City in Jerusalem, it features ancient buildings, roads, and architecture. Akko is also famous for a prison escape by a radical Zionist organization called the Irgun, the same outbreak that Leon Uris wrote of in Exodus. In Akko, we toured the city, visited some art museums, and saw what was to be seen. The city is mostly Arab and we walked through the Arab shuk. I bought a flannel shirt and we saw this shark: It was a very cool trip.

We then bused back to Haifa to sleep and eat there. The next morning we woke up and went to catch the first of our two tours of the famous Baha'i gardens. The Baha'i are a 100-some year old religion that is supposedly the most dispersed religion in the world. I don't know much about their practices, but they believe in a universal oneness, respecting of all religions, universal education, equality of the sexes, and much more. They have these gardens in Haifa, which is the center of their religion, that include 18 well-groomed terraces and a huge Shrine in the middle. Located on top of a hill, the gardens overlook the city of Haifa and into the Mediterranean Sea. Here's a picture: The gardens are beautiful and peaceful and if anyone is in Haifa I would highly suggest seeing them.

Sar El

So I spent these past three weeks on an army base called Amiad in the north next to Lake Kinneret and Tiberius. My time there was spent doing the work of an army jobnik, which are people whose work in the army is non combative. They work on bases so that if a war breaks out then they are ready and equipped for it. After the Lebanon the government really saw how ill-prepared they were in the event of war so now they are spending more time on base upkeep i case of the outbreak of war. So as a temporary jobnik I would work to organize a warehouse full of solder's bags or cleaning guns. Other kids helped clean tanks. The work was typically trivial, but it was cool to be doing something that so directly benefited the army. I also was able to meet many interesting solders. My group went on some trips; one to a hike next to the Kinneret and one to an ancient city towards the coast. In Sar El we had to wear army uniforms all the time. Here's a picture of me in mine inside the room that I lived in for the three weeks.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

So I'm now anticipating a change in location and activity. I'll be leaving Jerusalem on Sunday and going to an army base to begin three weeks of Tsar-el. It is a community service program for the army that is fairly popular. The only clothes of mine that I'll be wearing will be undershirts, socks, and underwear. I won't be bringing any t-shirts or anything that I usually wear. It'll be the first time that I'm away from all my possessions that I've grown so attached to after wearing them and seeing them everyday for years. I'm excited for this distance even though it'll likely be very novel.

After the Tsar-el I'll have a week or two of vacation followed by two months of Marva starting on January 6th. Marva is army program that I've been talking about for months. I don't know much about it so I won't post about it right now.

I've had a break here since last Wednesday. I spent Shabbas with the rest of my program because it was a closed Shabbas. We had to go to programming and everything was planned and it was very BBYO-esque. On Sunday, after waking up late and taking it easy, some friends and I went down to Tel Aviv beacuse there were bomb threats in Jerusalem and we weren't allowed to be on the streets there, but Tel Aviv was safer. So we went to Tel Aviv and walked around the city for a bit jut to check it out and then had dinner. After dinner I left my friends to meet up with a new pair of friends and we went to one of their counsin's house for the night in Ramat Gan. The cousins were very nice and they give us beds and a couple of meals.

After sleeping for a while I got up to go back to Tel Aviv to watch Across the Universe, a musical movie that features on songs from the Beatles' repertoire I really liked it and afterwards we took a bus back to Jerusalem and just hung out for the rest of the night. By now it's getting pretty cold in Jerusalem so at night you have to wear shoes and a sweatshirt, or a jumper as the Brits like to call it. I've been going to more bars than I did in the beginning of my time here.

It'll be hard for me to update this blog when I'm doing my two military-related programs because I won't have my computer with me for those times and the time off is Shabbat so I can't use my computer anyway, but I'll somehow find time for updates; don't worry fans.

Since last post I have been a little busy. My mom and dad were in Israel so I saw them a fair amount. I met some scientist friends of my dad's and it was very nice to see my folks. My group went to the Mevo Modi'in Moshav. It practises what is known as Carlebach Davening. A moshav is a type of settlement. It can be similar to a Kibbutz, but I think there are plenty of moshavim that are quite different. I didn't fully grasp the philosophy of the moshav, but I did find out that there is plenty of artists and I didn't see any farmland, so I'm under the impression that it doesn't emphasize community living and labor, as is found in the Kibbutz movement. Shlomo Carlebach was a musician and Rabbi. His followers use his music in their prayer services and the end result is very very beautiful. The moshav's population follows this format of davening so the services are filled with song and it's great. The whole Carlebach movement is inside Orthodox Judaism. The people on the Moshav were basically hippies. Before Shabbat our host played us some songs on this small, strange guitar looking thing. I really enjoyed the trip and hope to spend another Shabbat on the moshav.


I found out my placement for the next three months and I will be doing Marva, the army program. I'll spend the first two or three weeks doing army community service. Then two weeks vacation followed by two months of living on an army base doing army training stuff. Towards the end of those two months I will leave two days earlier than everyone else to go to Poland for an extra trip, but I'll speak of that closer to the date. While in the army I'll do some basic training, some in-field training, a lot of learning, and more. Supposedly the first two weeks are terrible because you're not used to waking up that early and the program is really slow because it's all classes, but then after that it gets awesome. I'm excited.

I'm in the middle of exams and I'll be done tomorrow afternoon. For my King David class I had to pick a chapter that we didn't study in class and examine it closely. Afterwards my teacher came up to me and told me that I found things in the chapter that she had never thought about and that she was very impressed. Shwing! I have a week vacation next week so I'll be staying in the hostel for it, but going on day trips in and around Jerusalem. It should be awesome!

Sigd and Tottenham and Phylacteries

So now that I'm very accustomed to living in Jerusalem and I know my way around I find myself very very busy. I go to all different types of events and have little time to publish them in an internet blog. Nevertheless, I feel I have a commitment to the fans of this blog to update as regularly as I can afford to.
I went to a city called Rosh Ayin with my History of Zionism class. Rosh Ayin is a primarily Yemenite city that absorbed tens of thousands of Yemenites during their mass immigration to Israel. Called Operation Magic Carpet, Israel removed the entire Jewish population in Yemen in the 1950's and brought them here using airplanes. It was a humongous immigration that was hard to accommodate when they first arrived. Also the Yeminites are neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazi and they didn't really fit into Israeli culture. So at Rosh Ayin are all these Yeminites and we met a few and talked to some about their migration. After we went to a dance studio and learned some Yemenite dancing.

I'm doing a program called Shevet which is a part of Young Judaea Year Course that leaning towards being religious without being completely observant. Through Shevet I get to do a lot of amazing things that I wouldn't do otherwise. We tied our own tzitzit last week and were given the option of using tekhelet, a special blue die that comes from snails, that is supposed to be part of tzitzit. So as I'm writing this I'm wearing my new, freshly-tied tzitzit with a thread of tekhelet in them. My program had a workshop where we learned how to do it and were given the strings and everything.

We visited a yeshiva, basically Rabbi school, and were given a chance to study and speak with the yeshiva students. I learned with a guy who actually went to and worked at Camp Airy. It was a good experience to find out more what it's like to be part of a yeshiva.

My mother visited me and took me to Eilat, the southern-most city in Israel that is on top of the Red Sea. While there we toured the immediate area of the city and saw some of the southern parts of the Negev Desert, including the Timna Pass and the Red Canyon. I also scuba dived. One one of our days we left Eilat and went into Jordan and then to Petra. Petra is this 2,000 year old city that is famous for an ancient temple carved 10 meters into the face of a mountain. Here is a picture.

My mother bought me my first set of Tefilin, phylacteries.










Yesterday I went to Sigd, an Ethiopian celebration of their return to Jerusalem. They used to celebrate it in Ethiopia and it was a fast day for mourning their exile, but now they it is more of a festival. I saw this cool Ethiopian dance circle and this interesting fish rod-looking instrument. It was incredible to see the thousands of Ethiopians that showed up in this one park. Celebrating with them was also really cool. Picture.














Last night I went to a soccer game; Hapoel Tel Aviv vs. the Tottenham Hotspurs. Tottenham, for those who aren't into football, is an English soccer club whose fan base calls itself the Yid Army because it is primarily Jewish. My roommate is a crazy Tottenham fan, his bed sheets are Tottenham, so he bought a bunch of tickets and a bunch of us went to the game. Tottenham won 2-0 and I learned that Israeli soccer is not impressive. Tottenham played half-decently, but Hapoel Tel-Aviv was awful. I went to my first European football game in Israel. Here is a picture of that as well.

Ethiopian says what

Today we drove to a city north of Tel Aviv. We went to a community center in an Ethiopian neighborhood. There we listened to a lawyer give us the quick history of his people. He told us the story of his specific town's immigration from Ethiopia into Sudan and then to Israel. Civil war broke out in Ethiopia and many Jews decided to leave their homes for refuge in Sudan. Seeing as they were already fleeing they figured they might as well go all the way to Israel, the land of their forefathers. So this man's small community of about 300 up and left their homes with some Sudanese peoples who had made the same immigration. They were traveling on foot when suddenly Shabbat came and the Ethiopians told the Sudanese they could not travel for a day. The Sudanese could not understand and told them that if they stayed where they were they would die and they left them. The Ethiopians would not be moved and they stayed till the end of Shabbat. By 10 AM the next morning they had run out of water and the children began crying and the people were in serious trouble. So the men went out and looked for water even though there were no animals around, a clear sign that there was no water. At around noon a man decided to dig under a pile of rocks and water sprung out of the ground. They finished Shabbat and kept moving. The next day the Sudanese found them and, once they had heard about the water situation, told the Ethiopians that they had traveled the same route for years and had never known of a water supply. The Ethiopians had found an abundant water supply that had remained hidden from the frequenters of the land. Amazing, right? They continue their journey and finally make it close to the boarder of Sudan. On the boarder is a big city, though; a city that the Ethiopians could not afford to go through because of suspicion. So they circumvent the city and go towards the boarder. In the midst of this part of their journey they were severely low on water and a group of armed horsemen came riding up. They told the people that they knew they were Jews and that they were not getting into Sudan at gunpoint; the Ethiopians were devastated. The two parties started to talk and it turned out that one of the gunmen knew one of the families in the group and told his fellow gunmen that they would not harm these Jews in any way and that they'd help them get to Sudan. They show the Ethiopians where to find water and escorted them the rest of the way to the boarder: another miracle.
After listening to this story we were fed Ethiopian food and then made pottery with some woman.

Hike and a Speaker

Since Sukkot we've had a full 5-day schedule of classes. That means that I have classes till 4 and then I'm free for some of the rest of the days. So last week I took my free afternoon and traveled into Tel Aviv with some friends. We then went to see an Israeli ska band at some club. The opening act was the lamest thing I've ever seen on a stage; and I was in Wootton Theater. The lead singer was doing this really fake-looking hardcore personality and the rest of the band was equally lame. The drummer grabbed the mic for one song and sang this Spanish sounding song. The main band was this ska band that was really good and we had a lot of fun.
Last week we had midterms so I had two exams on the first day of exams and then none the second day. So I spent the day buying a tallis.
This past weekend I went on a big water hike in the north with some friends. I'm putting pictures up of that. The hike was absolutely beautiful and amazing. We trekked through waterfalls and streams.




















I also went to listen to a man talk about his service to the Jewish people in the late 1940's. He was in the Merchant Marines during WWII and then was asked to help with the illegal immigration of Jews into Palestine right after the war when Britain. He told us this amazing story of how he was just an ordinary American Jew who was asked to help the Jewish people by complete strangers. The whole operation was done very secretly. The ship this guy crewed brought 1,500 Jews into the Mediterranean, but the damn British boarded their ship and they got sent to Cyprus, like in Exodus. The man was a prisoner there, too. He was very inspirational and I thoroughly enjoyed him.

A Big Post About Sukkot

My last post was on Yom Kippur and since then I have been very busy. In Israel Sukkot is like a vacation time. A lot of people throughout the country do not work and go on trips or hikes (Israelis love hikes). So for the first few days of Sukkot I went to a settlement called Bat Ayin. It is in the West Bank and is the home of the Bat Ayin Yeshiva and about 100 residential families. I went to spend time with Avi and Debby Nueman, a couple who worked at International Kallah, a BBYO summer camp that I attended the summer of last year. Avi is a student at the Yeshiva and Debby works with pregnant women. I forget her title, but she trains them to give birth and then aids in the birth itself. Spending time with them was amazing; seeing as they were both very instrumental in my becoming religious I learned a lot. They have two young daughters whose names I can't spell because they are Hebrew, but they are both very smart and cute. The area that they live in is home to three natural springs called maayans. They are like mikvas, but there are different laws pertaining to them and are more cleansing than mikvas. The one maayan closest to their home was built by Babylonians. It is a natural spring that flows into a pool that is maybe 4 ft. x 4 ft. x 4 ft. and is home to six fish. You go into the pool naked and dunk your head as many times as you want. Some choose four for the letters in God's name, some do six for the directions, but I chose to do seven. Each time in the maayan was very cleansing and
put me in a really good space for thinking and praying. Bat Ayin also has some of the most interesting people I've ever met. All of the people I met were very learned and had a great desire for Torah. I learned so much from the conversations I had with the neighbors. One of Avi's neighbors even lent me a book on Rabbi Akiva. I really loved spending time in Bat Ayin and I look forward to the next time I go there.

I observed Sukkot for the first time while in Bat Ayin. I slept and ate in the Sukkah and shook the Lulav and Etrog that I bought. Sukkot is a really beautiful holiday and it is a shame that it is widely ignored by American Jews. There are only three commandments regarding Sukkot and one of which is simply to be happy. The rest of the holiday is very open ended and allows for time spent with family, loved ones, and God.

Since Sukkot is mostly a vacation in Israel I had no classes and still don't till Sunday. My program took us on a lot of trips. We had a color wars, went to a museum to learn about a special blue dye made from snails that we use on tzitzis, and to a national park where we had to herd a flock of sheep and goats. The coolest thing we did was spend Simchat Torah in Safed (Sfat). It was a crazy party. We stayed in a place called Ascent which is a hotel run by Chabadniks. We then began to eat and drink and dance with the Chasids and it was a really great time. I didn't drink a lot, but some of the kids got super drunk. Some Chabadnik jumped on top of the bima and it broke under him. After a few hours of singing, dancing, and drinking we left for the host families that fed us. We left the hotel about 30 min. later than scheduled so my host family had already eaten when we showed up and they gave us what was left; which I didn't mind. there was another family eating with them and the men of the households, both named Eyal, struck up conversation with us. They are both Chasids who happen to be very smart and knew a bit about Kabbalah. After they told us about the army service they had done I told them about this research paper I did on Life of Pie and Kabbalism and they were both impressed by it. One of the guys even asked me to email it to him. After dinner, we danced some more in a shul with like 20 drunk 15 year olds and then had a little chill session at the hotel where we sang and shared stories for a few hours. I met this man named Osher who told me about how he has lived in Israel with Jews his whole life and has never felt pride in his Judaism like I do because I grew up with so many non Jews. To be Jewish for me means to be religious and to show my Judaism, but for an Israeli to be Jewish is different because he is surrounded by them. The idea that I'm trying to describe blurs the line between Judaism as a people and a religion. After speaking with him for some time I went to bed. I woke up early the next morning at nine and went for more dancing in local shules. At around 11 I was completely out of it. I had slept horribly the night before and my voice was shot and I had been dancing for a while. I basically shut down till a while after lunch. The rest of the day was filled with learning and me being tired. At dinner they brought in this amazing guitarist who played for us. His songs were about God and Judaism. We ate pizza, which was so great, and then went out and danced in the streets with about a bunch of Israelis. It was tons of fun and afterwards we took a bus back to Jerusalem. The bus ride was awful, we got back to the hostel at 2 AM and I went to bed soon after. This post is supper long so I'm not rereading it for spelling errors.

Yom Kippur

I spent Yom Kippur in my youth hostel. A chazzan was brought in to lead the services. The guy was a nice guy and had a good voice, but he had this really annoying way of laughing far too much at his own mediocre jokes. The services themselves were very good and I took a lot away from them. On Friday night I went out with a few of my friends and walked up the road towards a small community. No city in the world shuts down like Jerusalem on Yom Kippur. On that Friday night we walked in the middle of the street and found the entire neighborhood outside in the middle of the roads. There are no cars at all. We saw one car when we were out and we were out for 2 hours. Afterwards I went back to the hostel and played Rumikub for a bit and then went to bed. I woke up the next morning and went to services. I took the high holidays very seriously this year and the praying was very intense and meaningful. I was in services from 9 - 2 and then a bunch of us wanted to walk to the Kotel (Wailing Wall). On the way we found this Israeli guy who walked with us. He claims to have done the exact walk every Yom Kippur for the past 25 years with the same route. He spoke good English and was very interesting to walk with. It was a hilly, two-hour walk, but we managed and I got to the Kotel to catch the last services of the holiday. Needless to say, it was absolutely amazing to be at the Kotel and I bumped into Zach Trupp, a boy who graduated with me. I broke fast with some free food that was handed out; muffins and juice. I then took a taxi home with some friends and ate more and relaxed at the hostel. Yom Kippur, along with Rosh Hashana, was incredible.
Hope everyone's high holidays were wonderful,
Kevin

So after Rosh Hashanna I've been really busy with all sorts of things. First of all I went to visit Samaritans. The same ones mentioned in the bible ("good Samaritans"), these people are very interesting. They claim to be descendants of Israelites who never left the land of Israel. They believe in the same Jewish Torah, but not the rest of the Tanakh, the Jewish bible. Their customs are similar to ours seeing as we lived next to each other for some time and we have the same holy book. For example they don't eat milk and meat because it says so in the Torah, but they have adopted our rules for that certain law. They won't eat chicken and milk or eat milk until six hours after eating meat; two laws derived from the Torah that only make sense after a considerable amount of extrapolating the original law. So they have many of the same customs and holidays as us but they are very different. Firstly they are not Jews and have no desire to be Jews. Secondly their Torah and prayer books are all in ancient Hebrew. The Hebrew letters that are used today are different from ancient Hebrew; the words are transliterated and not translated. Also they believe that instead of Jerusalem, the holy site is Mount Gerizim. They go up there three times a year. The most interesting time is when they go up for Passover. All of the Samaritans go up this mountain and ritually sacrifice lambs as dictated in the Torah; a sacrifice that we stopped doing because the Temple was destroyed. I'm going to try and get over there for Passover this year. I'm including a picture of their Torah in this post.


After the Samaritans I went to a small town that was one of the first settlements in Israel by immigrating Jews. We went to a museum and a winery in the town and it was interesting. I'm including pictures of the winery because it looked a lot like a level in a James Bond video game. We also had a wine tasting, but I didn't like the wine very much. Afterwards we went to Tiberius and had dinner in the city and slept in a youth hostel on a mountain over looking the city. I tried this chocolate that was chocolate with little pieces of Pop Rocks in it. It was really cool. The day was nice and it was cool to see the country. The next day we went to a graveyard and learned about the second wave of Jewish immigrants into Israel. These people by and large were a group of Jews who were sick of living in Europe where pogroms and the blood libel accounted for hundreds of Jews being murdered. They came to Israel to flush out swamp lands and battle malaria infested mosquitoes so that Israel could become a Jewish state. They started farming settlements that would become the boarders of modern day Israel. To protect themselves from thieves they made a group of armed horsemen that would eventually turn into the Haganah and then the IDF. So clearly these Jews paved the way for Israel in ways they never thought possible. They also began the Kibbutz movement. After we learned about these pioneers we had a talk with a modern day Kibbutznik whose Kibbutz is in the middle of a city rather than a farm. These people focus on things that modern day Israel needs with the same socialist slant that the original Kibbutzniks had in their farming communities. They do social action projects about social problems that face Israel like racism, sexism, homophobia etc. He was very interesting in his grassroots look at socialism and changing Israel for the better.

Last night I did Kaparot. This is an old Jewish ritual that many of my readers will think is pretty awful. You pay money for a chicken and, while holding it, say a prayer over it and then raise the chicken over your head and say another prayer. The prayers say that we have sinned and that we deserve to die, but instead God should accept the chicken as a substitution for our death. Then the chickens are killed right there and unfeathered and given to poor families to eat before the fast (it's a mitzvah to eat chicken for that meal). The place that we did it stunk and there were so many dead chickens it was gross. The meaning behind the tradition is to give to charity in a way that is relevant to Yom Kippur and atonement. It was really cool and I'll put up pictures of it on the blog.

Since then I have just been taking my classes and enjoying Israel. I hope everything is well on the other side of the Atlantic and that Syria chills out.
Kevin

Rosh Hashana

So I spent Rosh Hashana with a family of orthodox Jews this year. We went to three shuls, all within walking distance of the family's house, over the course of the two day festival, or chag. It was all very interesting to see this huge Jewish community and there was a chazzan who was absolutely amazing. The family that I stayed with, the Scher's, were very hospitable and, even though I had made plans with them only a day or two before chag, they still managed to feed me well and take good care of me.
This week I am feeling much better than I have as far as my health goes. Today is actually a fast day that I'm observing. I didn't get a chance to have dinner last night so this has been a particularly bothersome fast, but I can eat in less than three hours and I'll truck through. I did laundry for the first time since I got here and, let me tell you, laundry is a serious business. Classes are going well and everything is great.

End of Week One and First Day of Classes

So Wednesday last week we left the hostel at 7 AM to take a three hour bus ride to the Galilee, the northern bit of Israel. On the way there the girl to the left of me started vomiting due to motion sickness and then the girl on the right of me totally fainted on top of me. It was crazy. We finally arrived and enjoyed a great 5 hour hike through the southern Galilee. Afterwards we set up our sleeping bags under the stars and the tour guides made us dinner and we schmoozed and went to sleep. We woke up the next morning to see more sights and do more stuff. It was all very great. I'm going to add some of the better pictures from the hike onto this blog so check them out! After I got home from the hike it was about 7 PM the next day and I wasn't feeling well so I took a shower and went to bed and slept from 8 PM till 10 AM. Ii wasn't the best sleep, but it was long and that was good. I woke up the next morning to go to the doctor's and they gave me an IV with antibiotics. It made me feel better and I went to the Kotel to pray Kabbalat Shabbat. For the less informed readers I'll explain that the Kotel, the wailing wall, is the most holy place in the world for a Jew and Kabbalat Shabbat is Friday night services. My group was so spirited that we had army guys, chasids, and some secular Jews tell us how amazing we are. It was pretty cool. The Kotel was an amazing experience. To stand next to a wall that was part of a building destroyed 2000 years ago was such a testament of the longevity and strength of the Jewish faith. It was a great service and I'm very happy about it all. The rest of Shabbat was great and I'm really liking it here.

Classes started today. First I had Hebrew class, then Zionism, and finally a class on King David. All my classes thus far look amazing and the teachers are very passionate. I'll update more regarding my classes after I've been in them longer.

Shalom!
Kevin

Just Arrived

First and foremost the plane ride wasn't great. I didn't sleep and now I'm completely disorientated, but it's alright. I've made a few friends including my roommate, a British guy named Josh, who I've been getting along with well since we met earlier today. Other friends include a girl from Boston, a few more British kids (we have about 20 in my section), and many others. The year is looking better and better as I meet these kids, a lot of whom seem to be really nice. The room I'm staying in is pretty nice. We have a great balcony that connects with all the other balconies on my floor so it'll be a cool feature to have. Besides that it's a bit bigger than a dorm room and I have my own bathroom and stuff to share with Josh. Tomorrow I'll be having a day of orientation and then on Wed. I'll be going on a big hike in the Galilee and I'll update more about those later.
~Kevin

I will be using this blog as a journal to keep my friends and family informed about my trip to Israel. I will try to update as regularly as I can. To receive e-mail notifications for when I update you can click on 'Subscribe to: Posts' right below this.